"The bottom line is that we

achieved a three-fold

increase in productivity"

William M Stoiber, Cooper Power Systems.

As Cooper Industries (CI) and Cooper Power Systems (CPS) continued to grow globally, it became obvious that a product data management (PDM) system for managing its CAD and other related documents was needed and that it had to be integrated with its SAP business system. In 2006 Cooper began an expansion of its SAP document management system (DMS) to handle CAD and other engineering-related documents.

A key component of this expansion was automating the creation of a neutral exchange format (PDF, DWF, etc.) of CAD files so that they could be readily accessible and easily used by all groups inside and outside of engineering.

The challenge was daunting. Our goal was to both (1) automate the conversion of CAD files to a neutral format upon check-in/import and (2) automate check-in of about 100 programmatically generated CAD files (no human intervention) every day. Some of these files are highly complex 3D models ranging in size up to 500 MB or larger and consisting of more than 100 smaller components and sub-assemblies.